Rashid Khalidi Says Israel Cannot Lease Occupied Jerusalem Land for U.S. Embassy
July 15, 2026
Columbia University professor Rashid Khalidi: “This is our land. Israel has no right to lease it to the United States.”
Let that sink in. The U.S. is moving forward with plans to build a brand-new embassy in Jerusalem, but the chosen site sits on land violently appropriated from Palestinian families during the Nakba—including Rashid Khalidi’s own family.
The site for the new embassy belongs to Palestinian families who were forcibly expelled from their homes in 1948. Decades later, the occupying force is “leasing” this stolen land to the U.S., completely erasing the rightful owners who still hold the physical deeds.
You cannot lease what you do not own, and you cannot sanitize theft with a diplomatic seal.
Source: @democracynow
#JerusalemIsPalestinian #LandTheft #USEmbassy #HumanRights #fyp
English Script:
Rashid Khalidi: A number of Palestinians own that land as private property “waqf” as inalienable Islamic endowments. Including my own family. Dozens of Jerusalem families, including dozens of US citizens. So here we have the US government signed an agreement with the Israeli government to lease land. The Israeli government has no right to, to which we have title. We and many other families have titles. In order to establish an illegal embassy, in Jerusalem, which is in violation of repeated UN Security Council resolutions. Next, it should not have an embassy in Jerusalem in the first place. And to call it the internal, indigenous and forever capital of Israel doesn’t change international law. That’s a violation of international law. It’s also a violation of the property rights of the Palestinians, whose ownership of this land is attested the right up to the end of the British Mandate, when many members of these families were receiving rent from the British government, which had established a military compound at the Allenby compound or the Allenby barracks. So these families had repeatedly brought to the attention of previous American administrations the fact that this is our land. Israel has no right to it. The United States has no right to lease it from Israel. And right up until the Biden administration, there was a reluctance on the part of American governments, in spite of their unlimited support for Israel to take this step because it involved the United States leasing land that belonged to, among other things, American citizens, the private property, in other words, of Americans, was being stolen by another government and then leased to the United States for use as an embassy. We learned through a freedom of information requests that under Biden, the State Department was considering the claims of the heirs, the heirs to the owners of these properties back in 1948. And, including myself and my family and many, many other Jerusalem families, including, I repeat, multiple U.S. citizens, as well as Canadian, European and other citizens and they were worried clearly about these Palestinian property claims, which are justified. I mean, we have done an enormous amount of research. We’ve gone through Ottoman, British, Israeli, Jordanian, Islamic court files, and we’ve proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that the materials that we submitted again and again to the US government going back to the 1990s, that this is our land. Israel has no right to lease it to the United States. The United States has no right to lease it from Israel. We intend, the heirs of the property owners back in 1948, intend to submit an updated request to the administration to explain why they have pivoted away, from the hesitation of the Biden administration right up to the end of its term, to go ahead with the lease of this property.
